This is often called Broken-down time and is used in a C structure called struct tm. Perl is written in C, so it is not surprising that it uses it.Neither is Perl alone in that, many other languages use this format.I guess Larry used it because everyone would expect that format and is familiar with it.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other